Editor’s Word: This evaluation initially ran throughout the 2025 Berlin Movie Pageant. “The Ice Tower” opens from Yellow Veil Footage in choose theaters on Friday, October 3, 2025.
Beautiful and glacial in equally frosty measure, Lucile Hadžihalilović’s “The Ice Tower” is all art-film-only vibes, a wintry Nineteen Seventies fairy story a couple of display screen actress who casts a probably harmful spell. It’s anchored by an actress, Marion Cotillard, who has one of many nice faces, and a classical sophistication with a glamorous, out-of-reach noirish magnificence that pairs splendidly with a creature reduce out of Hans Christian Andersen: amorous, elusive, however wounded.
Shot gorgeously in France and Northern Italy by cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg — that is actually essentially the most visually astonishing film to date to premiere on the 2025 Berlinale — “The Ice Tower” will show an uneasy catch for commercially minded audiences searching for something greater than a temper in characteristic type. However these desirous to be hypnotized by cinema, as this movie actually does put you in a state of trance, will get pleasure from a singular expertise from the director of “Innocence” and “Evolution,” and spouse and artistic accomplice of Gaspar Noé, who cameos on this movie as a director operating a ’70s movie set manufacturing led by an enigmatic star.
Hadžihalilović and screenwriter Geoff Cox graft the fundamentals of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” right into a much less mythic however extra modern story concerning the energy and pull of artifice. Newcomer Clara Pacini stars as Jeanne, a 16-year-old orphaned after the demise of her mom, the one reminiscence of which exists within the type of a handful of beads she purloined from the mom’s useless physique. She’s whisked off to an orphanage excessive away within the mountains — and the place, precisely, “The Ice Tower” is about by no means actually issues, as regardless that it’s set within the ’70s, the setting feels firmly out of time and place. Jeanne, although, finally ends up operating away, first stumbling upon an ice rink the place a lady named Bianca is skating to “It’s 5 O’Clock” by Aphrodite’s Youngster. Or is it truly set within the ’70s, or only a cinematic house meant to evoke the time interval?
Jeanne, whom we are supposed to perceive as prudish and only a bit sheltered with a face whose inscrutability suggests she hasn’t seen a lot of life in any respect, is struck by the skater and the sexuality she probably wields. Like Hadžihalilović’s 2004 “Innocence,” set at an all-girls boarding college the place the brand new college students are introduced in inside coffins, “The Ice Tower” is at its coronary heart (and never that it has a lot of 1) a coming-of-age story about feminine sexuality and company. So when Jeanne, who’s now going by Bianca, by accident winds up in a movie studio the place a manufacturing of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” is going down, it’s onerous to inform whether or not her fascination for Cristina (Cotillard) is extra sexual or mother-daughter. Maybe it may be each.
Cristina and Jeanne’s first introduction is an eerily staged scene that says what a corridor of mirrors “The Ice Tower” can be, and the way applicable on condition that the framing machine of Hans Christian Andersen’s story is in reality round a mirror, which right here Hadžihalilović makes use of the digital camera instead of. Jeanne friends via an aperture within the wall the place she’s fallen asleep to see a floating, ethereal Cristina as snow falls down upon her, just for that floating determine to be simply an actress, that snowfall to be faux film set stuff, as a director calls reduce and what Jeanne was truly watching was a movie take.
What follows is a perverse folie à deux between Cristina/The Snow Queen and Jeanne/Bianca, whose relationship borders on erotic however hovers nearer someplace to a mentorship, at first, as soon as Cristina begins taking Jeanne beneath her wing, and Jeanne upstages one other one of many younger extras on set. Their relationship by no means crystallizes into something concrete, which retains “The Ice Tower” firmly within the realm of moody dream house reasonably than something melodramatic that’s even barely giving when it comes to emotion.
At one level, Cristina tells Jeanne that they are often collectively without end, or go away tomorrow and by no means look again, however Jeanne chickens out on the provide whereas they stare off over a cliff, placing a way of doom over the place their dynamic is headed. At one other, Cristina invitations Jeanne to a drink solely to ghost her on the promise totally, leaving Jeanne standing alone within the chilly and beginning to sense the delusion she’s caught over how a lot this girl may truly be excited about her. That their relationship takes a flip in the direction of sexual assault remembers an earlier second within the movie the place Jeanne is picked up on the facet of the highway by a person in a van who guarantees to drop her off “after a quick detour.” The world of adults is a harmful one.
When it comes to temper and tone and its personal artifices and surfaces, “The Ice Tower” is a stunner, shot with Cinemascope framing that brings a vastly dramatic energy to many lengthy, languid close-ups, particularly as Cristina watches the dailies of her film. A soundtrack created with the ondes Martenot, an digital instrument that sounds very similar to a theremin, creates a dreamlike spell that solely provides to the movie’s trance-making attract. The understated performances and coolly indifferent, shivery hypnotic vibes of this movie gained’t be for anybody searching for a narrative, however “The Ice Tower” casts a creepy spell that lingers and even deepens within the thoughts lengthy after it’s over. As solely one of the best spells do.
Grade: B+
“The Ice Tower” premiered on the 2025 Berlin Movie Pageant. Yellow Veil Footage releases it on October 3, 2025.
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